Chasing the scent of Love, Truth, Beauty, and Mirth, wherever it may lead.

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Guns and Bombs

Is America
United Yet?

Explosive
devices —guns and terrorist bombs—seized the headlines last week, which to
astrologers was no surprise but to the rest of us cause for a wide range of
emotions. Guns particularly seem to fire people up on both sides, for and
against more controls. But I have a funny feeling the Boston Marathon bombs may
end up having the most far-flung and potentially damaging effects upon what’s
left of our democratic culture.

First,
the astrology, for it reveals all.

The
bombings happened the same week as the U.S. Senate jettisoned even the most
tepid rules for managing gun sales. That week the Sun and Mars, both ruled by
Fire, conjoined at exactly the same degree in the hot-blooded sign of Aries.
That explosive conjunction is the climax of a month of planets crowding the
sign of the impetuous warrior, of which Mars is the ruling planet. Among those
planets, Venus moved into Taurus on April 15, cooling down tempestuous
relationship issues, while Sun and Mars, having done their damage, joined her
in Taurus on April 19 and 20 respectively.

But
Mercury, planet of mental formations, remains in Aries, while Uranus, planet of
sudden shocks, will be there for several more years. So from the astrological
point of view the fireworks are most likely to continue for some time to come.

But
why? What’s behind the emotionalism of the gun issue? What kind of mind would
plot to blow up a bomb in a crowd?

—————

Begin
with the understanding that America is now and always has been a violent
nation. It’s part of the tradition passed onto us by our parents, our
relatives, our society, and our history. In so many ways we’ve yet to catch up
with the present. We’re no longer living on a resource-rich frontier where
every man—and woman, too—packs a gun. Yet apparently today guns are one of the
accessories of the American Dream. The more powerful the gun, the better chance
of keeping what you have (or getting what you want).

That’s
discouraging to me. I support stronger gun control laws, not because they will
necessarily prevent horrific events but because they define our national
interest and intent to curb those events.

So
I wonder what the emotionalism is all about. It seems to go beyond Second
Amendment rights. It’s more primal than any law.

I
remember my own fascination with guns when I was a kid in the 1940s and early
‘50s. My father didn’t own one and my mother was anti-gun, so, influenced by
the old western movies on television then, I played with cap guns and practiced
my fast draw in the mirror. Eventually, it seems, I outgrew that because guns
didn’t touch me again until the early 1970s, when I found myself living in a
commune with rural hippies who were also avid hunters.

There
I learned about rifles—twenty-twos for beginners, double-barrel shot guns for
small game, and thirty-thirties for deer. That was the extent of the average
country arsenal back in 1972. For my part I tried hunting a few times but never
took to it. Never shot anything, either.

But
I tried to shoot a puppy once. She was having fits, like epilepsy, and my
hunter brothers, rightly claiming more experience with country ways, convinced
me she had to be shot. Since her mother was my dog, I felt the responsibility.
It was during a blizzard. I took the shot gun outside to find the pup. She was
nested under the porch. I crawled under on my belly and, not three feet from
her, took aim and pulled the trigger.

Somehow
I missed. But that puppy screamed at me in shock and outrage such as I’ve never
experienced in this world. And I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. I was no
killer. Whatever made me think I could be?

Someone
else had to take over, and he efficiently dispatched the puppy. Later, we all
realized, she probably didn’t need to be killed. It was a group freak-out.

I
don’t think I’ve fired a gun since. All I can think of when I think of guns is
that little puppy, whose trust I had betrayed, screaming at me.

—————

Firearms
are for self-defense, primarily. Target practice is to develop an aim good
enough that you won’t miss. In fact, using a gun is a somewhat specialized
skill. To be good with a gun is of high value.

But,
as gun-control people keep saying, guns are, first and foremost, for wounding,
maiming, and killing other creatures, including human beings. I’ve seen no
convincing pro-gun argument which can refute that point.

It
seems, then, that people don’t want to give up their guns because having them
makes them feel safe, or at least safer, than not having them. Guns are
assurance against enemies, known and unknown.

Will
I one day wish I had a gun? Or regret that I didn’t? I can’t be sure. I have
the capacity for violence in me, but I don’t want to cultivate it. Owning a gun
would put an instrument of death in my hands. It would change my relationship with
the world around me.

Personally,
I wish there were no guns on Earth. But I live in a democracy in which
individuals are guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms. It’s like death and
taxes. Fair enough.

But
must I abandon my soul’s vision of a prosperous world some day at peace? I
can’t see that. What I can see is that withdrawal from the American addiction
to guns can’t be legislated. It must be voluntary or peace will never come.
There will always be war.

—————

Meanwhile, the terrorist attack on the Boston
Marathon, widely and appropriately lamented, seems an unrelated event, as if
the Senate’s refusal to deal with gun violence has nothing to do with it. But
to me they are both on the same side of things. Demanding the absolute right
for private citizens to bear arms, including military-style weapons, shelters
the same intent to kill as the terrorists who set off those Boston bombs. They just have different targets.

As
I write this, the story coming from Boston is that both brothers sought revenge for
American deeds and misdeeds in the Muslim countries of Iraq and Afghanistan. There are a large number of people, at
home and abroad and including myself, who think America broke its own rules when we went to war
with the Muslim world. Now it’s leaking out that there are American special
forces in half a dozen or more countries, a kind of world war being fought in
secret. Meanwhile, drones fly overhead, spying on populations below and, with a
push of a button back in the U.S., killing suspected terrorists and any
civilians who happen to be in the neighborhood.

Twelve
years of this has radicalized many Muslims. As those years went by, does it
surprise anyone that, sooner or later, something like the Boston Marathon
bombings would happen?

We
are a world at war again, and true to a prediction of Hopi Indian elders many
years ago, this one is coming to us. And, as it’s always been, the majority of
us who don’t want war are going to pay the price. The last resort of population
control—after plague, drought, and famine—is war.